


the sacrament of penance

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Broadchurch, Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fobwatch, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-02
Updated: 2013-06-02
Packaged: 2017-12-13 19:05:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/827778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hardy is not officially a missing person. Yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sacrament of penance

**Author's Note:**

> a little bit Hardy/Miller, a little bit Ten/Rose. spoilers for Broadchurch.

Hardy dreams a lot.  
  
Dreaming is often simultaneously more interesting and more disturbing than the rest of his day in Broadchurch – which, if you ask him, is a stellar indication of just how much his life’s gone to shit.  
  
Most of the time, he dreams about the stupid bloody sea and the stupid bloody town, with its stupid bloody people and this fucking terrible case. Men and women stand lined up on the sand, a row of suspects photographed against the shifting backdrop of surf, and they talk and talk and talk but never actually _say_ anything.  
  
Sometimes, though, he dreams about snow.  
  
—-  
  
Hardy keeps a watch on his desk.  
  
Ellie’s noticed it more than once. It’s beautiful, really, all polished silver and etched circular designs. She figures it must be old, because Hardy doesn’t seem the type to purchase a pocket watch brand new. It could be a gift, she supposes. He doesn’t act like it’s anything special, though, never seems to pay it any mind – just shoves it aside, shuffles it around on his desk in favor of coffee cups and case files and crime scene photos. He wears an ordinary wristwatch day-to-day, though Ellie’s never actually seen him look at the time.  
  
She asks him about it once, when they’re burning the midnight oil a few weeks into the case. Hardy is sitting at his desk, squinting quizzically at something on the computer screen and muttering irritably under his breath.  
  
“What’s with the pocket watch?” The question comes out around a mouthful of too-salty chips, something to break the prickly silence that always seems to settle between them when nothing’s happening.  
  
Hardy doesn’t even look up from the computer. “What pocket watch?”  
  
She swallows the mouthful of potato and points towards the watch, half-buried under a pile of paperwork. “That old watch on your desk. Family heirloom or something?”  
  
He looks away from the screen then, though not at Ellie, and not at the watch. She’d say that his eyes go a little unfocused, a little glazed over, except that’s not quite right. It’s more like he’s looking at something that isn’t there. It’s a little bit frightening, that faraway expression on his ordinarily hard face; the incongruity is deeply unsettling in a way she can’t quite articulate.  
  
Then Hardy snaps to, almost violently, and briefly skips his gaze over the watch before turning back to the computer. “Yeah. Heirloom. That’ll be it.” He studiously avoids her questioning look, and stuffs a handful of crisps in his mouth.  
  
Ellie doesn’t bring it up again.  
  
—-  
  
He’s looking at a wall, touching it, laying a cool palm against white-painted plaster and wishing desperately that he could plunge his hand straight through it and find hers on the other side.  
  
He’s on a beach, and the wind is so strong that her hair won’t stay in one place for more than a second. It blows right through him, though – not one hair out of place. It can’t touch him, and she can’t either.  
  
He’s standing somewhere cold, and there’s snow in his hair and a song in his mind – not in his ears, but _in his mind_ , and it’s beautiful but it’s terrifying and he doesn’t want to die.  
  
He’s waking up in bed, hands reaching out for someone whose name he doesn’t know, heart pounding uncontrollably, working double-time the way it always does when he gets stressed.  
  
He’s tried to explain the way that feels to his doctor; the way this single heart just can’t seem to cope, how nice it’d be to have another one to help. All he gets is a dark look and _you’ve gotta stop running yourself into the ground, Alec. Take a holiday. Find a hobby. Get more goddamn sleep._  
  
What is it that people say? _“I’ll sleep when I’m dead?”_  
  
That sounds about right. If his dreams are anything to go by, at least it’ll be interesting.  
  
—-  
  
It’s not quite accurate to say that Hardy is the last thing on Ellie’s mind, after.  
  
Hardy, in fact, is there when nobody else is. He’s there when the boys are asleep in the hotel room, after Ollie’s gone home and she just can’t be alone with the silence any more, with the great gaping void where Joe ought to be – where the man she thought Joe was ought to be. He’s there with cups of bad coffee and with _I wanted to be wrong._ He’s there to sit next to her on the beach the night of Danny’s funeral, and he’s there the next morning when she needs something to scream at, something solid to take her rage and anger and not throw it back at her.  
  
They spend nights together, everywhere but her room (where the boys are sleeping, or pretending to) or his (which he seems reluctant to spend any more time in than strictly necessary). They sit in the bar and don’t drink anything, or stand outside in the freezing cold and talk about nothing. The tension that’s always been in the silence between them slowly starts to bleed away, replaced instead with something more comfortable, more calm.  
  
They pretend they aren’t propping each other up, grasping for something stable in this collapsing circus tent of a life.  
  
He stops calling her Miller, and every time he says _Ellie_ in that rough voice of his it’s a reminder that life is _different_ now, and that it’s never going to be the same.  
  
(She shouldn’t like the way it rolls off his tongue).  
  
Hardy’s there, and then, one day – well, eight days, actually; she knows the exact amount of time that’s passed since they took Joe in, since her life fell to pieces, because marking days off the calendar is one of the few things she feels capable of at the moment –  
  
– one day, Hardy’s gone.  
  
—-  
  
Hardy is not officially a missing person. Yet.  
  
It’s only been twenty-four hours, and he is, after all, a grown man with full use of his mental faculties. Presumably. Ellie has her doubts about that last bit, but even she has to admit that it’s still possible he just doesn’t want to be bothered. It’s Hardy, after all. Not likely he’d think about how that’d make people worry, the bloody great pillock, not how it’d make her–  
  
Ellie swallows the thought before it can go any further, and goes to get Becca to let her check his hotel room instead.  
  
From his hotel room, it doesn’t look like anything’s out of the ordinary. Ellie has to push down the part of herself that says _how would you know_ and _some fucking detective you are._ But objectively speaking, it’s pretty true – at the very least, this isn’t the room of someone who’s done a runner. His clothes, such as they are, are still hung up in the wardrobe. There’s still a spare pair of shoes tucked under the bed, and a half-empty bottle of pills on the bedside table.  
  
His wallet is there, too, next to the bottle, and that – well, that and the pills – that makes her worry.  
  
She knows she probably shouldn’t, but she picks it up and opens it.  
  
It’s a typical bloke’s wallet, really. Cracked leather, rounded edges worn down from years of being tucked away in coat and trouser pockets. Credit cards, business cards, about forty quid in notes – and a picture.  
  
It’s a girl. She’s young, maybe fourteen or fifteen, with brown hair and a gentle sort of smile. She must be Hardy’s daughter, Ellie thinks – there’s a bit of resemblance there, in the way that the girl’s mouth quirks up a little bit at the edges, in the color of her hair and the set of her jaw.  
  
She turns the photo over. There’s some sort of looping, delicate scribble in the top left corner; circles and dots and lines twisted around each other in a beautiful little pattern.  
  
In the bottom right corner, there’s a name written in messy, slightly smudged handwriting.  
  
 _Susan_  
  
(There are a row of question marks after the name, drawn and crossed out and redrawn, something asked and gone unanswered over and over again).


End file.
